Turner prize 2011 shortlist
Turner prize 2011 shortlist: Humbrol enamels versus bath bombs and lipstick | Art and design | guardian.co.uk
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There may be two painters on this year's Turner prize shortlist, but traditionalists should pause before sighing with relief.
One of them paints landscapes in the kind of enamel paint used for decorating model trains and aeroplanes; the other counts lipstick, bath bombs and bronzing powder among her unorthodox materials.
The painters, George Shaw and Karla Black, are joined on the 2011 prize shortlist by sculptor Martin Boyce and video artist Hilary Lloyd.
Prize juror Katrina Brown, director of the Common Guild in Glasgow, said the list was not representative of "one school, or cluster, or movement – there is every medium in the mix and it has a diversity and maturity about it".
In contrast to the Young British Artist-dominated shortlists of the 1990s, when the centre of UK artistic life appeared to be the few square miles around Shoreditch, this list is determinedly non-metropolitan, with only one of the artists – the Newcastle Polytechnic-trained Lloyd – based in London.
"It is a sign of the maturity of the art scene in Britain that it is not all concentrated in the capital," said Brown.
Indeed, the whole prize will turn its back on London this year: the annual Turner prize exhibition, which opens on 21 October, will be hosted by the Baltic gallery in Gateshead.
It is the first time in the show's 27-year history it has been held outside a Tate gallery and only the second time it has been held outside London.
Shaw, who studied in Sheffield, lives and works in Devon while Black and Boyce are based in Glasgow – where the last two winners of the prize, sculptor Susan Philipsz and painter Richard Wright, were brought up.
Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain and chair of the jury, said that the Glaswegian focus was testament to the strength of the training available at Glasgow School of Art in the 1990s.
Curtis said of the two painters: "One may be seen as innovative but is actually quite traditional, while the other seems quite traditional but is actually quite innovative."
The work of 38-year-old Black involves cosmetic products – including nail varnish, eyeshadow and moisturiser – deployed on a grand scale in large installations that look more sculptural than painterly.
But juror Godfrey Worsdale, director of Baltic, said her work could be compared to that of the abstract expressionists, the artist hurling cosmetic products across a surface just as Jackson Pollock cast paint over canvas.
According to Brown, there is a conscious play on the gender associations of what she called Black's "girly" palette of cosmetic pastels. But the artist also uses more "macho" materials, such as soil and earth. Black represents Scotland at this year's Venice Biennale.
The apparently traditionalist Shaw, 44, paints the landscape of his upbringing – the Tile Hill housing estate in Coventry.
In some ways his paintings appear photorealistic, but his palette is restricted by the Humbrol enamel paints he uses – materials usually more associated with hobbyist model-makers than with the Turner prize shortlist. These paints render his scenes "muted and sombre" with a curious surface sheen, according to Brown.
His art depicts "forsaken places" – the dull, dark corners of postwar housing projects – and his paintings are often imbued with a "sense of foreboding" and appear to hover uncertainly between the present and the past of Shaw's adolescence, said Brown.
Landscape With Dog Shit Bin (2010) is one of his less romantic titles; but he can also give his bleak, Midlands views grand titles from the annals of art history, such as Assumption.
Boyce, 43, creates sculptural installations that often reference the modernist design of the early 20th century.
A set of designs for concrete trees made by the modernist French designers Joel and Jan Martel (1896-1966) have been a special focus for him: he has used the twins' forms in sculptures, and even created a kind of alphabet out of their shapes.
Lloyd, 46, is nominated for an exhibition at the Raven Row gallery in London, which she filled with video projections that also became, along with their AV equipment, a kind of sculptural installation.
Unedited, and unfolding in real time, her films might focus on a motorway bridge under construction or the movement of a crane.
The Turner prize winner will be announced at a ceremony in Gateshead on 5 December.
Aside from Brown, Worsdale and Curtis, the judges are curators Vasif Kortun and Nadia Schneider. Previous winners of the prize include Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, Mark Wallinger and Martin Creed.
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